Blackfin, I fully understand and agree with what you're saying except the last paragraph. It's not borderline criminal imho no matter what the law says. It's poor judgement at best. Keep criminal charges out of questionable parenting. Don't dog pile with police (who everybody distrusts otherwise) backing. Let's concentrate on the real criminal. Odd that the value of the stolen item has any bearing at all. Says a lot about our sense of criminal justice.
"IMHO" is cool. It's all most of us have
But legally-speaking there is a fine line between "poor judgement" and "negligence." In LaPlante v. Laplante, the judge wrote:
"“… “[E]rror of judgment" alone will not amount to negligence. That must,of course, be right, in the sense that there may be several courses ofconduct any of which a
reasonably careful parent might follow in a givensituation, and it will be enough to answer a claim in negligence that the
course adopted by the defendant parent was one of those which thereasonable careful parent might have taken, even though events may, ofcourse, have shown the choice to have been unfortunate.”"
A
paper on the issue of parental responsibility and negligence includes:
"
The LaPlante decision also indicates that the test to be applied in determiningwhether that duty has been discharged is an “objective” one in the sense that theparent is expected to do, or not to do, that which, according to community standardsof the time, the ordinary reasonably careful parent would do, or not do, in the samecircumstances. The test does, however, have a subjective element in that thereasonable parent must be put in the position in which (and with the knowledgewhich) the defendant parent found him/herself."
I've underlined something of interest: As I mentioned previously, thirty or forty years ago this sort of thing may have been within the norms of community standards but what happened the other day is not; times have changed and so have norms. Errors in judgement happen all the time but errors of a particularly egregious nature, errors that no reasonably careful parent nowadays would make, tread that fine line.
Leaving a 3 month old in a running, unlocked car in a public place because it's too inconvenient to take 10 seconds to park the car and pull the kid out of a car seat
is pretty egregious. Even if we say, "Okay, it's just bad judgement, no police involvement..." I'd still expect some form of visit from child protective services to establish whether or not there's an ongoing risk to that child's safety from repeats of this or other parental behaviours.